For the past two decades, digital product design / UX has been shifting to become a more strategic discipline within organizations. Partially because business leaders have started to pay attention to how design-driven companies have seen tangible return over investment in design, going from tiny startups to successful global businesses. But partially because

designers have fought hard for it: one of the most heated debates in our industry in recent years touched on how designers needed to understand about business, learn to map design decisions to business KPIs, and ultimately secure a seat at the table where strategic decisions are made within an organization.

As companies continue to increase their investment in design, and digital teams continue to grow, the company leadership feels the need of assigning managers who can keep those different design teams up and running.

Senior individual contributors (ICs) are expected to become leaders.

Leaders are expected to become managers.

But designing and managing are two very different jobs.

在过去的二十年中，数字产品设计/ UX已经转变为组织内更具战略意义的学科。 部分原因是企业领导者已开始关注设计驱动型公司如何看到从设计初创公司到成功的全球企业的设计投资的有形回报。 但部分原因是

设计师为此进行了艰苦的努力 ：近年来，我们行业中最激烈的辩论之一涉及设计师如何需要了解业务 ，学会将设计决策映射到业务KPI并最终在战略决策所占的位置上获得一席之地。在组织内部进行的 。

随着公司继续增加对设计的投资，数字团队也不断增长，公司领导层感到需要指派可以保持这些不同的设计团队正常运转的经理。

预计高级个人贡献者(IC)将成为领导者。

领导者有望成为管理者。

但是设计和管理是两个非常不同的工作。

成为经理的(无形)压力 (The (invisible) pressure of becoming a manager)

Designers love what they do, but at some point in their careers, they feel the pressure to become a manager. In some companies, shifting to a managerial position feels like the only path of growth. But “growth” can mean different things for different people. Why do designers want to be promoted to a more senior position in the first place?

设计师喜欢他们的工作，但是在职业生涯的某个时刻，他们感到成为经理的压力。 在某些公司中，转移到管理职位似乎是唯一的增长途径。 但是“增长”对于不同的人可能意味着不同的事情。 为什么设计师首先要被提升到更高的职位？

• To have a broader impact on their organization. For a design idea to be implemented in larger companies, it has to get the buy-in from multiple stakeholders. In his article about the impact of product design, Josh Taylor, former Design Director of Evernote, reminds us that as designers grow and want their work to have a more significant impact in the team, organization, and society, they tend to naturally let go of the design craft and execution and move towards organization design and team management.

  对他们的组织产生更广泛的影响。 为了使设计想法能够在大型公司中实施，它必须获得多个利益相关者的支持。 Evernote前设计总监Josh Taylor在关于产品设计影响的文章中提醒我们，随着设计师的成长，并希望他们的工作对团队，组织和社会产生更大的影响，他们自然会放手设计Craft.io和执行，并朝组织设计和团队管理迈进。

• To continue to get salary increases. The reality of our industry is that the most obvious path to a higher salary is a managerial title. As an industry, we need to do a better job of treating senior individual contributors as equals with people managers. The status quo in most in-house teams is that if you have designers reporting to you, chances are you’ll make at least 20% more money than the most senior person you manage.

  继续获得加薪。 我们行业的现实是，获得更高薪水的最明显途径是管理职位。 作为一个行业， 我们需要做得更好，将高级个人贡献者与人员管理者一视同仁 。 大多数内部团队的现状是，如果您有设计师向您汇报，那么您赚到的钱可能比您管理的最高职位的人高出至少20％。

• For the prestige and clout of being a leader. Our industry turns the spotlight to directors, VPs, Heads of Design, and people with leadership-sounding titles. These people are given prime space in design conferences, blogs, press articles, and social networks, and in some cases, they become real celebrities of the corporate world.

  成为领导者的声望和影响力。 我们的行业将目光投向了董事，副总裁，设计主管和具有领导才能的人。 在设计会议，博客，新闻文章和社交网络上为这些人提供了主要的空间，在某些情况下，他们成为企业界的真正名人。

• For peer pressure. Linkedin has made everyone’s career trajectories easier to compare, and like any other social network, made the grass look deceivingly greener on the other side. If everyone that I went to school with is getting promoted, why not me? Am I lagging behind? Have I been stuck in the same position for too long? What story am I going to tell on my resumé?

  对于同伴压力。 Linkedin使得每个人的职业轨迹都更易于比较，并且像其他任何社交网络一样，另一端的草坪看起来也更绿了。 如果和我一起上学的每个人都得到晋升，为什么不给我？ 我落后了吗？ 我被困在同一位置太久了吗？ 我要在履历表上讲什么故事？

Are designers prepared, though? According to the Bank of England’s chief economist, poor management is the principal cause of the U.K.’s stagnant productivity. Another analysis by job market analytics company Burning Glass states that “management skills represent one of the biggest skills gaps in the job market”, and that “management roles have larger skills gaps than those of the people they manage.”

设计师准备好了吗？ 英格兰银行首席经济学家认为 ，管理不善是导致英国生产力停滞的主要原因。 就业市场分析公司Burning Glass进行的另一项分析指出，“管理技能代表了就业市场上最大的技能缺口之一”，并且“管理职位比他们所管理人员的技能缺口更大。”

Prepared or not, most designers decide to take that new position they’ve been offered.

无论是否准备好，大多数设计师都决定采用他们提供的新职位。

Gradually, their day is taken over by activities that have very little to do with the ones that made them be recognized as great, senior designers in the first place.

逐渐地，他们的一天被那些与使他们最初被认为是伟大的，高级设计师的活动无关的活动所取代。

我们成长时会去哪里？ (Where do we go when we grow?)

According to Tanner Christensen, head of design at Gem and a designer with nearly 20 years of experience, the answer is often: to an entirely different role. In his brilliantly written article “Where do IC designers go once they peak?”, Tanner highlights that after a few years as an Individual Contributor (IC), designers in product companies today find themselves seemingly stuck.

宝石设计总监兼拥有近20年经验的设计师Tanner Christensen认为 ，答案通常是： 扮演一个完全不同的角色 。 在他写的精彩文章“ IC设计师达到顶峰之后该去哪里？ ”，Tanner强调说，作为个人贡献者(IC)几年后，如今产品公司中的设计师似乎陷入困境。

“Today we lose many remarkable individual contributors (IC) product designers to the management track because it doesn’t feel like there’s any other way to grow and do meaningful work at-scale. We continuously teach others that people managers have more influence and impact on the world than ICs, partially because the inherent power dynamic of someone who makes design decisions vs someone who makes decisions that directly impact the career of the other person.” — Tanner Christensen

“今天，我们失去了许多杰出的个人贡献者(IC)产品设计师，成为管理者，因为这似乎并没有其他方法可以大规模发展并开展有意义的工作。 我们不断地告诉其他人，人事管理人员比IC对世界有更大的影响力和影响力，部分原因是做出设计决策的人与做出决策的人的内在动力动态直接影响到他人的职业。” —坦纳·克里斯滕森(Tanner Christensen)

另一条路是可能的 (Another path is possible)

Some companies have started to pay attention to this trend, and offer career paths that give equal opportunities for managers and individual contributors. The model has proven to be successful in tech positions and has recently started to be applied to design career tracks as well.

一些公司已经开始关注这一趋势，并提供了职业发展道路，为管理人员和个人贡献者提供了平等的机会。 该模型已经证明在技术职位上是成功的，并且最近也开始应用于设计职业生涯。

Zendesk Creative, for example, has an entire growth path for individual contributors that doesn’t stop at the “senior” level. Figma has been thinking about their career paths in a pretty fluid way, focusing on skills as “superpowers” that people can bring to the team. Intercom defines their career paths based on Results and Behaviors, stating that “leadership can be practiced by those on both the management and the IC path”. And plenty of other companies have been more transparent and open about how they define their career paths internally.

例如， Zendesk Creative 为个人贡献者提供了一条完整的增长之路，而这并不止于“高级”水平。 Figma一直在以一种非常流畅的方式思考他们的职业道路 ，专注于人们可以带给团队的“超级大国”技能。 对讲机 根据结果​​和行为定义他们的职业道路，并指出“领导者可以由管理层和IC道路上的人来实践”。 许多其他公司在内部定义职业道路方面也更加透明和开放。

These companies understand a designer’s career progression should be less about where they sit in the company org chart, but more about how much value they can bring to the company.

这些公司了解设计师的职业发展应该与其在公司组织结构图中的位置有关，而不是与他们可以为公司带来多少价值有关。

你无法成为看不见的东西 (You can’t become what you can’t see)

As we’re editing and publishing articles here at the UX Collective, we have noticed an abundance of resources for designers who want to become leaders/managers, but a gap for those who want to continue to focus on their craft. If you’re looking to pursue the leadership or management track, books like Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager, or articles like José Torre’s How can a designer become a leader are great starting points.

当我们在UX集体中编辑和发布文章时，我们注意到，想要成为领导者/经理的设计师有很多资源，但是对于那些想要继续专注于自己的手艺的设计师来说，差距很大。 如果您想追求领导力或管理能力，那么朱莉·卓(Julie Zhuo)的《经理的形成》( The Making of a Manager )之类的书或何塞·托雷(JoséTorre)的《 如何成为设计师的领导者》等文章都是不错的起点。

So we decided to start a new series.

因此，我们决定开始一个新系列。

‘Leading with craft’ is a limited series of articles where we shed a light on stories of designers with successful careers and who continue to grow as individual contributors.

“以Craft.io引领”是一系列有限的文章，在这些文章中，我们阐明了具有成功职业生涯并且不断作为个人贡献者成长的设计师的故事。

We’ll be talking to information architects, graphic designers, researchers, product designers; people from different disciplines who share one thing in common: they have never let their seniority move them away from their craft, their practice, and their passion for what made them great in the first place.

我们将与信息架构师，图形设计师，研究人员，产品设计师进行交流； 来自不同学科的人们有一个共同点：他们从未让自己的资历使他们脱离自己的技艺，实践和对使他们变得伟大的激情。

Hopefully, this series will show to young designers that they don’t have to abandon their craft as they grow in their careers. And for senior designers who are at a point where they need to make a decision whether to pursue a managerial path, we hope this series will inspire them to have ‘the talk’ with their managers about revisiting what growth looks like for them.

希望这个系列能够向年轻设计师表明，随着他们职业的发展，他们不必放弃自己的Craft.io。 对于需要决定是否要走管理道路的高级设计师，我们希望本系列能够激发他们与经理进行“对话”，以重新审视他们的成长情况。

If you have any suggestions of people we should be talking to, send us an email: hello@uxdesign.cc. We’re looking for designers with more than 10 years of experience who have been successful in their careers and who haven’t really stopped being hands-on because of their seniority/level.

如果您对我们应该与之交谈的人有任何建议，请给我们发送电子邮件：hello@uxdesign.cc。 我们正在寻找具有10多年经验的设计师，这些设计师在自己的职业生涯中取得了成功，并且由于他们的资历/水平而没有真正停止动手。

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